The pastor and the Qu'ran

At this point, it's still unclear what the Senate plans to do exactly about Terry Jones, the Qu-ran-burning Florida pastor. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has been most out front, in the wake of the deaths in Afghanistan in response to the burning:

Free speech is a great idea, but we're in a war. During World War II, you had limits on what you could say if it would inspire the enemy. So burning a Koran is a terrible thing, but it doesn't justify killing someone. Burning a Bible would be a terrible thing, but it wouldn't justify a murder. But having said that, any time we can push back here in America against actions like this that put our troops at risk, we ought to do it.

It's worth remembering here that there really is not quite any such thing as pure free speech in the United States, general perceptions to the contrary. A citizen cannot directly incite violence without expecting some consequences, for one. Then there's defamation of character.

Still, it's true that the US is different from other countries in this regard. In 2008 the New York Times reported on a case in Canada in which the publication in Maclean's magazine of a Muslim-bashing piece of work by the American conservative writer Mark Steyn resulted in the magazine being put on trial. This would probably never happen in the US. Likewise, campus "speech codes" have generally fared pretty badly in American courts.

In the NYT article linked to above, even Anthony Lewis, the great civil-liberties crusader who wrote a column for the Times for many years, is quoted as saying that maybe a couple of exemptions to free speech should be considered:

But even Lewis, a liberal, wrote in his book that he was inclined to relax some of the most stringent First Amendment protections "in an age when words have inspired acts of mass murder and terrorism." In particular, he called for a re-examination of the Supreme Court's insistence that there is only one justification for making incitement a criminal offense: the likelihood of imminent violence.

I'm well aware that as a journalist I should be an absolutist, and as an American I fully subscribe to the notion of the robust marketplace of ideas and all that. But I think these are difficult questions. It seems pretty obvious that Jones is trying to incite...if not violence, then at least rage, and that there's not one redeeming social quality to the act.

Graham's "we're at war" standard is a dangerous one to use, though, for the simple reason that this "war" can be declared by our leaders to last forever, because it's not as if "Islamist extremism" is going to announce someday that it is no longer at war with the west and sign the instruments of peace on board a battleship. On balance, it's probably better if the Senate just stays out of this one.